Esoterra was a zine which existed from the early 90′s up until the year 2000 chronicling the far-out of the far-out in culture. Emphasizing the importance of hidden and obscure voices, Esoterra easily found its self lodged on many bookshelves snugly between Simon Dwyer’s ‘Rapid Eye’ series, V. Vale’s ‘Re/Search’ books, and Adam Parfrey’s seminal ‘Apocalypse Culture’. Not many zines have been able to claim these important and controversial works as neighbors.
After Esoterra stopped publishing physical copies in 2000 they continued with online content. I’m not sure how many copies of each issue ever got printed but those that were became difficult to get. Lucky for us, earlier this year Creation Books published an anthology of “the best material from the magazine” – according to creator and editor Chad Hensley. Unfortunately, it’s not everything but what remains is pretty damn cool.
Esoterra: The Journal of Extreme Culture is packed to the brim with reflections on society from voices rarely heard and often ignored to the point of subtle silence. Highlights include a interviews with Adam Parfrey, Alan Moore, Iain Banks, Genesis P-Orridge, Peter Whitehead, Iain Sinclair, Boyd Rice, and Thomas Ligotti. There is also a pretty good piece on the Process Church, a piece of fiction by Thomas Ligotti entitled ‘The Nightmare Network’, Adam Parfey’s ‘Weird Sex Cults’, a short piece on necro-ethics by known necrophiliac Leilah Wendell, and some pre-Lords of Chaos pieces on Black Metal my Michael Moynihan.
Not everything within is amazing, I found myself skimming over a couple of pieces, but overall this book is fucking great. There are a couple of interviews that veer off into sketchy (or possibly sketchy) areas, but fuck, we’re talking about a book with an interview with a necrophiliac in it, so it shouldn’t come as a shock. I think that’s part of what I like about it. If you’re gonna explore “Extreme Culture” you don’t turn away because someone said something offensive. And I know people will disagree, wishing in some way to eradicate the voices and opinions that cause tension and challenge the nice, neat world we want to live in. If you feel that way, this book isn’t for you. What I really mean is that Esoterra is a well rounded exploration of the far-out, so next to the anarchist voice you have the elitist voice, next to the humanist you have the misanthropist, and next to the underground, writer/artist/musician you have the fucking necrophiliac.

Bow to the riff! Kneel before the altar of the amp and receive your daily bread in the form of pummeling pairing of two of the world’s finest doom/sludge practitioners..This isn’t stoner rock, this is bad trip music. Seriously bad trip music.
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You’ve gotta have balls to call your band something as over the top as Wolfbeast Destroyer. Stones the size of elephants, and a tongue firmly in cheek.You’ve also gotta be seriously powerful to live up to it – the mental image the name conjures up is a bloodthirsty,bestial killing machine. Lucky for us then that the band who chose that moniker have that kind of feral whirlwind attack in their music.
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As healthy as the underground scene in Ireland has grown to be over the years, we’re not exactly known for leading the field when it comes to grindcore. Abbadon Incarnate are the obvious example of an exception to that rule, a band who’ve developed from Satanic Death Metal into a full on grind wrecking ball over their existence..but other than that the genre is still a relatively unknown commodity outside of the odd one-man bedroom based novelty project.
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Yeah, I know, I know, another day another band doing the “downtuned metallic hardcore” thing. I’m as tired of it as you are at this stage, of hearing band after band trying to either be His Hero is Gone or Converge or..I dunno, some sort of cross between His Hero is Gone and Converge. It’s becoming harder and harder to find bands in the field with any identity of their own. But they’re out there. And England has one of the best – Manchester’s Pine Barrens.

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Napalm Death were having a show here last night in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is their third time here and they are still as brutal and abrasive as ever. So much energy and so much entertainment. And the heart of the show was the spectacle of watching frontman Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway do his unorthodox presence on stage. After all these years, they’re still consistent, and have great reputable achievements from “Scum” (1987) to “Time Waits For No Slave” (2009) – Napalm Death are still creating new and excitingly different albums. The surprise of the evening was their covers of songs from Cryptic Slaughter “Low Life“, Siege “Conform” and lastly the legendary Dead Kennedys “Nazi Punks Fuck Off“. So yes, the godfathers of grind are truly and still amazingly unbelievable.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post since I got back from MDF but fuck it, shit happens. Anyways, can somebody please explain the band Ghost to me? I’m be-fucking-wildered at how/why this seemingly innocuous, 70′s rock throwback, Witchcraft-lite with goofy costumes can turn the gnarliest of DeathMetalers and the crustiest of punks into screaming, crying beatlemaniaesque teenyboppers singing along to every word.

Now, for full disclosure, the first time I heard this band I was so fucking annoyed I made it through about 15 seconds of song after the vocals came in and then slammed my fat meatpaw against the keyboard repeatedly until it fucking ceased. At first listen, my impressions were basically limited to, “Fuck this pussy shit, this sounds like fucking Journey and I hate it. What is wrong with you for giving me this to listen to? You are a puppyfucker.” That coupled with the fact that when the co-writer who posted it on my site/gave it to me to listen to had it taken down by their lawyers in like 36 seconds officially sealed the deal that these assclowns were basically a cause that wasn’t even worth losing. Read the rest of the discourse after the jump!!!

Blood Folke, for me, were the very band that I always wanted to exist in Minneapolis. Somehow they pull together the perfect storm of innate brutality with a subtle gentleness. Yeah, gentle and brutal – I said it. Don’t worry though, this doesn’t sound like the 10,000th band trying to bridge the gap between Mogwai and Neurosis. But, there is a haunted quality that comes out between the layers of rhythmic assault, loud to quiet to loud guitar, and viola that pours out pure beauty and near-drone. In my experience, most bands who have a viola (or a violin) tend to rely solely on that to evoke feelings of haunt, the aura of weeping, and/or bring forth an element of ‘epic’ as an afterthought – with Blood Folke I’d argue, rather harshly, these elements are there because the band wrote them in as a whole unit. As in, they thought this through and fucking wrote these songs. I won’t say that the viola doesn’t add to the haunted effect, just that this isn’t a one trick pony (or three, I suppose) and this isn’t a band who decided to throw in a viola because, “It’ll sound super killer, bro!” Blood Folke is a band with three goddamn people, playing heavy, well thought out, artistically driven Metal that is full and complete; and with a flare for avoiding the obvious and a knack for writing song that, while not overly catchy, you will be humming to yourself again and again. Damning tradition and starting a band with nothing but a guitar (who’s player also does vocals), a viola, and drums isn’t necessarily an ultra risky venture – what in the age of abandoning the traditional rock set-up – but I’d have to say that they make it look fucking easy and they do it better than most. And, with only a small hand-full of shows, and a 4 song demo (which sounds better than many full lengths) behind them I can’t fucking wait to see what they come up with next. They really are one of those bands who I can’t say enough good things about. The only question I have is: are they looking for a bass player? Because I totally know a guy….
Blood Folke : Winter’s Summer

The demo is available here for free and you should probably go download it right fucking now.

(photo credit: Sharyn Morrow)

Seidr is a collaborative doom project between Austin Lunn (Panopticon) and Crow from Wheels Within Wheels. Seidr have made this album of no frills ambient doom-metal and it is a record that takes chances within the their chosen genre and the high-points are truly spectacular and its flaws are minor but sadly occur all throughout the album making ‘For Winter Fire’ a tough album to sit through but lets focus on the positives and there is many to choose from. The band really know how to work the atmosphere and this album is a totally chilling experience that is meticulous in the way it is put together.

The sound of the band is best compared with the darkest Neurosis material so this is closer to post-ambient, post-rock doom more than anything traditional in the doom-metal genre. There is bursts of pummeling riffs and some extremely thick guitar sounds and the clean vocal passages work very well. 5 out of the 7 songs all go way past the 10 minute-mark which is one of the draw-backs to the album, nothing wrong with long-songs but they have to be good to keep you interested but sadly with this album, they miss the mark way too often.

The album opens with ‘A Vision from Hlidskjalf’ which is typical of most of the album, it is over 11 minutes long and after the opening few minutes which sounds like a long-lost movie soundtrack, the real doom is unleashed and it is lurching and thunderous. Not much really happens throughout the 11 minutes, the crawling pace doesn’t really change except for one odd passage where it changes musical direction completely sounding more like a post-rock band than doom-metal. The emphasis here is on doom and not metal, not that the band isn’t heavy but this is all about the icy atmosphere surrounding the Nordic-inspired concepts. There seems to be a lot of redundant passages within this song, at least 5 minutes worth by my calculations and that excessive padding gets more noticeable as the album plays on, especially in the albums second-half. After the jump the rest of the review will take over your soul.

Well if you were to ask me, name one album from the last months worth of reviews that is guaranteed to please, it would be ‘Heart of the Fire’ by Massachusetts trio Faces of Bayon. It is not that this is album of the month and honestly there is a few albums that I would rate a little higher than this one but this album has all the elements guaranteed to satisfy a wide-range of heavy-music fans.

The band was formed in 2008, and recorded all of ‘Heart of the Fire’ live in the studio and have dedicated the finished recording in memory of drummer Matt Davis, who died suddenly in January 2011. Mike Brown has since become their drummer, but on ‘Heart of the Fire’ , it’s the band’s original three-piece that you hear, with Davis and bassist Ron Miles led by guitarist/vocalist Matt Smith, who played in the legendary Warhorse just before they recorded the monumental ‘As Heaven Turns to Ash’ album.

The Warhorse connection gives you a little clue as to what brand of stoner-doom the band is dishing out here. They trudge along slow with an extremely low bottom-end and just when you think it can’t get any lower, it gets lower still.Read the rest of this smoking review after the jump!

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